Imperial (150 page)

In the same park where I’d met that true believer in
maquiladoras,
Señor Prieto, I interviewed a mother and daughter from Chiapas. They came a year ago, “to look for work” as the mother put it.

And how did you end up here in Chilpancingo?

Right here is closer to factories.

And how is it for you?

Right now we’re looking for work.

But many of these factories have signs:
SE SOLICITAN PERSONAL
.

Because my daughter doesn’t know how to read, they don’t accept her. She is working at a factory but she got sick, said the mother, and then they refused to give her job back.

What kind of sickness?

She had a growth on her spine.

I said I was sorry, and asked what had caused the growth.

They gave her penicillin to treat it. We don’t know the cause.

And what about you, señora?

I work at night.

What sort of work?

A plastic factory.
²⁸⁴

Is it good or bad?

It’s good, more or less. We’re renting, and we need to pay the rent.

It’s good, more or less.
What did that mean? That dapper reporter had said: The black story of
maquiladoras,
I think there are bad conditions for the workers, but conditions may be better than for workers employed in Mexican industries in the south.

The daughter took care of a three-month-old at night. The possibility came to mind that she was either retarded, the mother of the baby, or both.

The mother worked a twelve-hour shift, starting at six-thirty at night and finishing at six-forty in the morning. They gave her forty minutes to eat and seven hundred pesos a week. It was a four-day week, which sounded not so bad to me.

How about your health? I asked.

I know that sometimes working with plastics can be hazardous. Well, my eyes are getting worse. It’s pretty dim, and because you can’t see well and you’re tired, it affects your eyes. I examine the little pieces of plastic for telephones and make sure they’re clean and not scratched.

They, too, had never heard of Metales y Derivados, whose ruin stood in sight upon the hill.

Are
maquiladoras
good or bad for Mexico, and why?

To tell you the truth, I don’t know, the mother said. Her name was Señora Candelaria Hernández López. Her daughter was called Alicia Hernández Hernández.

INDUSTRIAL PARK LOS PIÑOS

It’s good, more or less.
What if it truly was? I remember the first time I successfully shot covert video inside a production area: Turn right on Campos; that’s a dirt road; and on the other side of Canal Libramiento, you’ll get to Los Pinos Industrial Park, where by some fluke a few pine trees do remain. They’re soliciting female personnel at this
maquiladora
and that. (I quote the dapper reporter: Some are moving to China, but there are forty-eight industrial parks and a hundred thousand people employed in Tijuana! In some places they have five thousand or eight thousand vacancies! Maybe other factories
²⁸⁵
are offering more.) Passing private security cars in the street, we reach the spot where a security man sits in a doorway with his arm around his girlfriend. Now let’s duck into the ornamental thicket, as if to urinate. Switch the power pack to ON. And the button camera aims upward at spare blue skeletonwork of gates and fence, with salmon-colored clouds which on later viewing I won’t remember now squiggling across the blank blueness of the entrance gate; did it really look that way or is the button camera employing artistic license? The world wriggles and shifts. Young women’s heads rush toward us at the bottom of the frame (especially notable is one copper-faced extremely Indian-looking lady who passes in profile, bearing a majestic knot of black hair); then they all veer rightward, vanishing onto the long sidewalk, which is to say out of the button camera’s ken. Now, as the security guard gets distracted in his booth, the button camera, accompanied by Terrie for communication and me for locomotion, bears us inside the
maquiladora
’s private world. And presently, at eight minutes thirty-six seconds, we approach the blue-rimmed doorway, number thirteen, with white vertebrae of light running diagonally through its blackness. Closer still, we see a blue-ribbed wall or door on the right, a smoother grey one on the left; now two strings of lights come into view; they are ceiling-tubes, dwindling toward perspective’s vertex; and the end of some kind of framelike affair begins to loom out of the darkness, with silhouettes huddled indistinctly around it. Lurching still closer, the button camera abruptly brings us into a warm salmon-colored universe where four people bend over the worktable, two on each side, boy-girl, boy-girl; they could almost be a pair of happy couples playing some board game; they don’t seem hurried, weary or grim . . .

GERMÁN’S STORY

It’s good, more or less. Here there’s life, more or less.
And what should a life be?

You and I who both can read are unlikely ever to know what it must have been like to work in Metales y Derivados, but here is a story which approaches that untold tale.

Señor A. said that he found the man named Germán on Saturday, arguing with one of the guards outside Power Sonic. He was a very dark, somber, weary man who was sitting in Señor A.’s waiting room when we arrived. I had thought him another client, and greeted him, but he’d kept silent. In the private detective’s office, his face was nearly as dark as his hair.

Two years ago I worked in a battery factory called Power Sony, he said—an error which can be interpreted as suggesting either that he had been coached by Señor A. or that he simply wasn’t very literate. I myself believe the latter.

I was supposed to get off at four every day, he said, and I usually didn’t get off until seven.

Was this factory affiliated with Metales y Derivados?

I’m not positive, but I know the company had a lot to do with liquids. The batteries were for wheelchairs.

Where was this?

In an industrial area called Pacífico.

Is it near Chilpancingo?

They were going to build one in Chilpancingo but at the time I was working there a factory burned. My boss’s name was Jesús López. The first factory burned, so they moved us to another factory although we had thought we would have no job. This was the place called Pacífico. If you go back past the fountain for the Fifth Battalion, there are about thirty factories.

Slamming together the fingers of his big dark hands, he said: I would work extra hours and not get paid. Also, they don’t wash all of the equipment. Also, they don’t wash the clothes. They were very strict about making us wear goggles because we worked with sulphuric acid but they weren’t clean. I’m kind of embarrassed to say it but I got married, and I had to be sure that before I was having sex with my wife I washed so that I didn’t get the acid on her.

Did you get sick?

They gave us pills for dizziness, and we often got dizziness.

And did the pills help?

The pills only helped for a little while. Then the schedules changed. I was working from seven until four. But they changed the schedule so I was working from four P.M. to two A.M. And later the acids, there were people, I don’t know if it was allergies or what, but you could see their skins . . . After about a year ago, after I had quit, I went to the doctor for an exam and it came out that I was anemic. I had been working for two years. I finally decided to quit because for one thing they paid very little and secondly because I missed work one day and they refused to give me my weekly punctuality bonus of ninety pesos.

Was your wife for or against the decision to quit?

He stretched at his shirt and sniffed at himself. I think she did want me to quit, because it was affecting me, and the smell of
acid, acid,
was so strong that I had to keep my clothes in a separate room. I used to break out on my arms and on my neck. And it affected my sleeping patterns. I only slept three or four hours.

Are you still married now?

Yes.

Are you and your wife both working now?

I’m hoping to find a job in a factory where they recycle cardboard. My wife doesn’t work. We have four children.

Congratulations.

I returned to see if I could get my job back, he said then. But they told me no, not anymore. They said, you quit, and a week later we hired people who want to work here, people from Chiapas and the south, people who try to cross but end up staying here.

Why on earth did you try to get your job back?

Because wherever I went, people closed their doors.

I sat looking at him, trying to figure all this out, when he said: And the other thing was—Germán evidently meant the other reason why Señor A. had found him arguing with the
maquiladora
guard—I thought that I would be earning the same, six hundred pesos a week, but now, if I started it would be four hundred and fifty a week.

Why would it be less now?

Because they would have to go back and train me.

Who owns the battery factory?

The manager is Jesús López, but it is American. It’s entirely Mexicans who work there, about seven hundred people, counting secretaries. When I was an employee, about four hundred used to work there.

Would you allow your name to be published?

I can’t. I worry that I wouldn’t be able to get another job if I did.

Have you worked in the
campo
?

Yes, when I was eleven, harvesting lettuce in Ensenada.

Which is better, working in the
campo
or in the
maquiladora
?

Well, in the
campo,
because they pay you by commission. Even if it’s lettuce, chilis, if they pay you, say, two pesos a box, you can make out.

Did you ever really consider moving to Mexicali to be a campesino?

I thought about it before, but now that I have a house, I would rather stay here.

Then in a sudden rush he said: I began to work in the factories in 1986. I began in an American factory where they make metals. I was seventeen years old. I worked at the metal factory where they manufactured huge tubes which weighed more than a ton. I was working with a man in the south when one of the tubes fell and broke my leg. But they treated me really well. They paid me for four months. I would have liked to keep working there because I was getting raises and I was about to become the line boss. I knew all about the connectors and I even trained one of the supervisors. But they also used acids there, acetylene. They would place a tube inside and it would come out all covered in chrome. I have some friends who still work there and he is a boss there, a manager. I talked to him and told him that I wanted to work there, but it was very far away and I would have spent fifty pesos on taxis.

I also learned how to install the heating in the car, he said. We used a fabric called
pica-pica,
which means burn-burn. You used gloves and pants but not masks. I worked for five years in Kessler and another two in the battery factory, so I started to worry about my lungs . . .

I gazed into his dark reddish-brown broad and hopeless face, which was heavy with shadows and moustaches, and he said: I’ve seen a lot of things, especially women shaped like this—he made the motion men make to indicate flaring breasts and hips—who keep getting more raises, and the bosses keep saying to them, we’ll go out together. I’ve been working in factories for nineteen years. I don’t really want to work in factories again. Maybe in a vegetable market.

Are the
maquiladoras
good or bad for Mexico?

I live right now thanks to the factories. People say they provide jobs. But they generate a lot of contamination, a lot of trash. Now the factories just throw the trash down the street, even tires. I’ve had good luck with my jobs, but I’ve also had friends who after their six-month contract can’t keep their work.

Then he said: I used to have a dream that the timer went off saying the battery was done. If you don’t take it out on time it will begin to smoke, so I used to have a dream that I needed to disconnect the battery . . .

SALVADOR’S SCAR

And in Colonia Villa Cruz, on the bare hill overlooking Insurgentes, Salvador Santa Cruz (with a naked lady and a United Farm Workers emblem tattooed on him; he revered César Chávez, whom he said was barely known in Mexico) stood outside a relative’s grocery store at high noon because he had been suspended from Kimstar Plastics for tardiness; no doubt he, like Germán, might have been somewhat of a troublemaker; all the same, I pitied him when he said, speaking very rapidly:

If I miss work one day, they’ll deduct money from me. I started getting five hundred and fifty a week and now I get eight hundred and fifty, but every time you miss work they deduct. And I never miss work, ’cause I got to keep my budget in line. I provide everything to the people who pack. I supply them with foam bags for the computer stuff, and boxes. I don’t like to miss work, because I make eight hundred and fifty pesos but every time I miss work I lose two hundred to two hundred and fifty pesos. And sometimes they pay late. That’s why we went on strike, because they didn’t pay us on payday, but all the same they deduct money from us if we’re late.

I’ve worked there for three years now. The Koreans own it. They’re okay. The supervisors are Mexican, of course. My supervisor, ever since he’s been there, nobody likes him. They only give us half an hour lunch. As soon as the bell rang I went in, and he said I was eight minutes late and that wasn’t right. I told him that’s not right. I said, bring your supervisor. They bring the security guard and he was against me, too. I sure didn’t wanna sign that paper that said I was eight minutes late, ’cause then I was going to get suspended. Well, I got suspended and here I am.

(In fairness to the
maquiladora
supervisor, I may as well note that Salvador was forty minutes late for our next rendezvous, and he never showed up at all for the last one. And so that sad argument over eight minutes may well have been conducted in perfect self-righteousness on both sides. Foreigners’ worship of time clocks, Mexicans’ tendency to do things in their own good time, guess which one wins?)